The Cloud Corporation

With impressively unconventional language, Timothy Donnelly’s
The Cloud Corporation explores the inextricable conflict
accompanying the acquisition of knowledge and the act of
thinking. Many of the book’s poems read like the experience of
peering into the mind of someone who spends extensive periods of
time alone, musing on the philosophy of the everyday. Donnelly’s
speaker often expresses a desire for passiveness—to be removed
from the process of thought altogether—or demonstrates an
attempt to rationalize spiritual thought and themes with his
bleaker version of reality. The poet takes the language and
ideas of the spiritual for a fresh spin, even rewriting certain
biblical stories to fit with a more modern perspective of
commerce and industry. In “Chapter for Breathing Air Among the
Waters,” Donnelly epitomizes this prevailing uncertainty of
knowledge:

not freed
but caught up in what thinking
tries to conceal:
its foundation
made of clouds, an anchorage

in sinking down where to know
is to feel knowledge dissolving
into particles of pause, the many

Throughout the collection, there is a resistance to the
tenuousness of thought—the foundation of knowledge is as fragile
as the clouds in the sky, which appear to have substance, but
represent instead an elaborate illusion. Thinking is what we do
to avoid what might happen when we stop.

In Donnelly’s poems, there is often a deep chasm between the
self and others, best exemplified perhaps by a poem where
objects take on life more than most humans in the book, and the
speaker relates to their makers in this fashion. The notion of
an inherent chasm and the related struggle is prevalent
throughout these poems. Wisdom, spirituality, and
existence—among other overarching themes—are consistently at
odds. “Intellectual activity / removes us briefly from the
swelter of existence,” Donnelly writes in “No Diary,”
emphasizing the mundaneness of existence, a poem which goes on
to decry the inability to place intrinsic value on simply being.
In this sense, the poet often fuses the philosophical with the
commercialized, a notion which is depicted in the book’s title.
The collection’s title explicitly depicts a corporatizing of
that which is most impossible to render commercial.

Continuing with the idea of a struggle Donnelly writes, “even
though I have come / through long experiment to abhor being /
nothing terrifies me more than the prospect of it stopped.”
These lines exemplify the speaker’s attitude about a sort of
limbo of existence—the equal but opposing terrors of
thinking/existing and ceasing to exist. This constant push and
pull of life and conscious thought is demonstrated in the
recurrent image of trying to breathe underwater, a struggle
characteristic of many of Donnelly’s poems.

At times lonely and fatalistic in tone, this collection
exudes its fair share of humor as well. Many of Donnelly’s poems
are strikingly clever and well-executed, despite occasional
wordiness (a laborious run-on enjambed across several line
breaks here or there), heavy-handedness, or esotericism. While
Donnelly’s speaker is wont to lay the blueprints for a dystopian
society, decry the inherent fleetingness of irretrievable
memories, or, in one of the collection’s most remarkable poems,
openly mock the superficiality of the placating powers of
religion, the collection does not allow itself to indulge too
much in its own pessimism, complicating certain presumptions
with well-placed and intelligent allusion or historical
reference. The Cloud Corporation is not a book to be read
lightly, as the poet puts a lot of faith in the reader. Donnelly
should also be applauded for his collection’s formal qualities
and variations. Overall, The Cloud Corporation is a very
impressive and intelligent collection, which must be approached
with the proper care and attention for maximum appreciation.